What would it take to collect modern cards again?

[7nohitter]

Originally Posted by geor952

i want topps heritage for a buck a pack, with 10 base cards per pack!!!!!

exactly!

[abothebear]

I just found out that a girl at my church has a summer job for the printing company that prints for Topps. When she realized I knew something about the hobby she asked me in a very perplexed manner, "I don't get it, we print SO many, how can they be worth anything?"

I was saddened by how easy it was to answer her. I said, "they aren't worth anything. They are worthless filler cards that come with the gamblers' chance of finding a slightly less worthless "special" insert card."

I didn't get a chance to tell her that I collect cards from a different era so I bet she left the conversation wondering why I opened with, "I was trying to get to Chicago this week to go to the national card show..."

[the Rock]

I agree with much that has been said here. It's not just the cards, their value, or lack of, cardboard type, or distribution. Unless I could look at the cards somewhat like I did as a child, the pursuit is worthless. Sports is so overexposed now that you almost can't get away from it. Nothing is left to the imagination. Now you know everything and too much about every player. I miss things like " Ned runs a Standard Oil station in the off season too" or "Al also spends part of his year doing TV repair". Real people that you could relate to.
In other words, we know too much to make modern player collecting fun again.

[DixieBaseball]

As Frank mentioned if a company would make a collectible that I could snag in a box of cereal or on the back of a Hostess Cake box, etc. then that would peak my interest. I have fond memories of collecting Kelloggs 3-D's in the 70's. I also remember going down to my local Kwik Sak and snagging a wax box for about $6-$8 as well. What a treat... When cards were .35cents to .50cents it was fun.... Bottom line for me, Kelloggs needs to get back into baseball and do a 75 player 3-D set and only offer them in boxes of cereal. Make it a collectible again...

[Brendan]

Originally Posted by the Rock

I agree with much that has been said here. It's not just the cards, their value, or lack of, cardboard type, or distribution. Unless I could look at the cards somewhat like I did as a child, the pursuit is worthless. Sports is so overexposed now that you almost can't get away from it. Nothing is left to the imagination. Now you know everything and too much about every player. I miss things like " Ned runs a Standard Oil station in the off season too" or "Al also spends part of his year doing TV repair". Real people that you could relate to.
In other words, we know too much to make modern player collecting fun again.

There is definitely a point to this. When asking people who collected 50's and 60's Topps cards as a kid why they collected them, the answer was often for the stats and the rest of the info. Nowadays we can find just about anything we want about a player.

Inserting cards into products like in the past would work fine, though now there are licensing issues that didn't exist back then. When the baseball card companies took the gum out of the packs, they took the fun out of collecting and turned it into a serious business. Good for them, but not for the collector.

[ls7plus]

It would be an extremely difficult feat to accomplish, for me. I like rarer cards of stars and HOF'ers to be, and therefore am inclined to at least take a look at such cards as Joe Mauer's Chrome Gold Refractor rookie, for example, with only 50 printed. But with that limited production comes rampant speculation, along with a lot of purely transient demand (ie., making itself felt only while the player is still not only active, but on the upside, rather than the downhill slide of his career), artificially raising the prices to rather ridiculous levels. The last time I checked, such a Mauer "rookie" was booking at around $1500 or so, which, considering the fact that he probably has around 100+ other rookie cards and that one form of disaster or another can still derail his career, seems patently absurd. Compare this price to a '68 Topps Bench, in PSA 9, at around $900, and of which there were about 90 the last time I checked the pop report. So, while I would like to keep the rarer cards, the prevailing hobby economics in this sector pretty much preclude their purchase until many years after they are initially printed, after the player has established himself as a near-certain HOF'er, and the speculative and transient demand has long since departed in favor of newer stars on the rise.

Foregoing such rarer inserts and merely printing to meet expected demand, on the other hand, pretty much insures low values in the near and distant future, which is an important factor to me, though perhaps not to others.

When I want a card of a favorite current player or players, such as one of our Tigers who are currently overperforming, I tend to go with regional cards, such as the Detroit News/Free Press issues of 2006, or the Fatheads of
2010.

I think it can be done, but it would take a very delicate balance that's not yet on the horizon. At a minimum, I think there would have to be only one or at most two licensed sets per year.

Great, thought provoking post, and one for which I certainly have no answer.

Larry

[Rich Klein]

is that we are all dinosaurs to some extent and the world has changed.

For many reasons, some of which should be self-evident such as the tecnology explosion of recent years, the ability to watch baseball on a cable baseball network and some economic reasons, the dream of having a simple base set will no longer come true.

I ran into a fomrer compatroit of mine from Beckett at Walmart yesterday and during the course of our conversation he explained to me the simple exonomic reality of the sets we all want are economic losers and the only winners for the companies are the expensive sets built around the collector/investor (My term ther) getting "Hits" from the box

We can talk all we want, but as James said earlier, unless WE actively support the products of the world such as Topps Total (I loved that product for everyone was in that product) and Upper Deck tried with something titled like Upper Deck 40 which featured every player on the 40 man rosters. They both sat on shelves and did not sell as well as we would have hoped.

Regards
Rich

[DixieBaseball]

Perhaps, if the collecting numbers are down and have been going down, the cycle is being accomplished for rarer supply in the future. Meaning, we may look back in 10-20 years searching for great ball player's cards and find it may be more difficult than in the 80's or 90's, etc. If the demand keeps going down, and the companies keep producing less, we essentially are going to have low numbers of cards available from this era, so in a way, the problem may be resolving itself. We shall see in the futre when we all reach for today's stars and their "rookie" cards... We may also be another 5-10 years away from the production numbers hitting rock bottom as well.

[Leon]

Wow, I have been on this board since inception, which is around 10 yrs. I have always thought I was one of the only ones with my view of baseball today. I don't care for it at all. As I have always said (for the last 25 yrs anyway) there are no baseball players I really like. And if there is "one" (I can't think of one right now) then it's not enough for me to go back to watching today's major league baseball. I can't stand the way the players are overpaid, whining babies. That is at the heart of it. If you don't like the players on the cards, or the MLB itself, it makes you less likely to collect them.

I guess if I could change the rules and make it where I might collect again, I might make 1 set of TOPPS, with 750'ish cards, 10 cards to a pack for a dollar...with a piece of gum in it and issued in 3 series. Not gum that tastes any good but gum that won't make you sick and has some white sugary powder on it. Make mine kind of brittle, like it used to be. But then again I am probably just being nostalgic, longing for those summers in Houston, of the late 1960's, listening to the Astros on the radio in my front yard with the next door neighbor; Spitting sunflower seed shells into the green grass, with nary a worry in the world. Oh those days of summer....Fond memories.

[Exhibitman]

3-D nude pix of Anne Hathaway would be a start...schwinnggg!

Seriously, I agree with most of what's been written above and would add that the main ingredient missing today is fun. The various gimmicks that have developed have raised the financial stakes of busting packs so much that it is not about fun, just about gambling. If I was card-god I would insert 3-D cards or coins or Topps super type cards or a paper poster [one item per pack--none of this chase BS] in a small (under 100 cards) issue, no more glossy regular cards on fancy shmancy paper--just regular card stock, no more thick cards, no more parallel sets, no more factory sets. Autographed insert cards as true chases representing only the most elite player or two-perhaps the MVP or Cy Young award winners or he new HOF class--but on 2500 or so cards per player. The good old pink bubblegum in the pack. Smaller sets with fewer players and no manufactured SPs, so it isn't as much of a commitment to go after it. Used to be a couple of boxes would pretty much do it, plus a few acqusitions or trades, and that's enough to be fun. Much lower price points--no more three-figure boxes. I really wanted to bust a box of Topps A & G at the National but the price point deterred me.

[Brendan]

Originally Posted by ls7plus

It would be an extremely difficult feat to accomplish, for me. I like rarer cards of stars and HOF'ers to be, and therefore am inclined to at least take a look at such cards as Joe Mauer's Chrome Gold Refractor rookie, for example, with only 50 printed. But with that limited production comes rampant speculation, along with a lot of purely transient demand (ie., making itself felt only while the player is still not only active, but on the upside, rather than the downhill slide of his career), artificially raising the prices to rather ridiculous levels. Larry

Here's my opinion on this matter.

Let's take some anonymous player and let's see the number autographs of him in a given set. (note: I don't actually know any of these counts and I'm sure the corresponding refractors to numbering is off)

Base auto: 800
Refractor auto: 500 (numbered to 500)
xfractor auto: 250
green refactor auto: 100
blue refractor auto: 50
orange refractor auto: 25
gold refractor auto: 10
red refractor auto: 5
superfractor auto: 1

So it may seem rare when it's numbered to ten, but it's just the same as the rest of the 1,741 autographs except the border is a different color or it's shinier. I can understand why people like modern cards, as autographs and game used pieces can be interesting. However, the pull towards an artificially scarce card makes it easy to shy away.

[Iwantmorecards77]

Hey Al, I noticed you stated you like to assemble Heritage sets. Were you the one who just recently purchased my 2009 Neftali Feliz variation?

Back on topic...I do purchase modern here and there, though vintage has taken up most of my budget. I recently sold off some modern cards to fill in some holes in my rookie card collection from the 1970's - 1990's. Besides that, my card purchasing has stopped due to losing my job in June. The only way I can buy cards is to sell some. lol